Solar Energy // Current TV

What are the biggest design challenges facing urban areas?

With 1 billion cars worldwide and traffic congestion set to double in 20 years... more

DominicBlackwellCooper
added this
10 months ago
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30 comments

Solar Power Company Plans Giant Arizona Tower, Second Tallest Structure on Earth

In the desert of western Arizona, a power company proposes to build the world's... more

JanforGore
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10 months ago
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66 comments

Sacramento City Hall +three other sites to get solar panels

As part of its years-long effort to build a reputation as one of the nation's... more

lordsbassman
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11 months ago
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0 comments

Amazing! NASA Spacecraft Offers Detailed View of Saturn's Great White Spot

Los Angeles Times... NASA spacecraft offers detailed views of Saturn's Great... more

EthicalVegan
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11 months ago
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11 comments

Nuclear seems the LEAST deadly of all power sources...

According to these numbers, even rooftop solar is more dangerous! On a per TWh basis... more

JoFerg
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11 months ago
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0 comments

HISTORY in making: BUTTE COLLEGE First School in nation to go Grid Positive.

BUTTE VALLEY — Eight years ago, Lou Cecchi, a Butte College trustee, asked the... more

LOrion
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11 months ago
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Let the sun do the roasting for COFFEE

What a unique way to save energy

GoodGodGuy
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11 months ago
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0 comments

A Stunning Eco-Friendly Laptop

Andrea Ponti's Luce Laptop may be the greatest and the most fascinating... more

vinnieadler
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12 months ago
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0 comments

Biorhythms: Nj going solar

I took this video to show that there are good things going on in local communities and... more

JanforGore
added this
1 year ago
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42 comments

EARTH Music And Video Lounge

This lounge is for posting songs and videos of inspiration and awareness about Earth... more

JanforGore
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1 year ago
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16 comments

Artificial leaf that harvests solar energy makes debut

An artificial leaf that can turn sunshine into electricity was showcased last week at... more

JanforGore
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1 year ago
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66 comments

Weekly Mulch: Obama Lacks Vision on Energy, Stomach to Defend EPA

by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger President Obama made an energy speech... more

MediaConsortium
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1 year ago
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How Barefoot College is empowering women through peer to peer learning and technology

Sanjit "Bunker" Roy has found a better way to solve poverty: train women as engineers so they can transform their villages.

Early one morning in March 2010, Susanna Adelheid Huis left her home in the village of Uis Tsaurob in the central plateau of Namibia. Her family scratches a living as smallholders, here on the one per cent of her homeland that is forgiving enough to support subsistence agriculture. She took a last look at her house -- one of 12 in the settlement -- and thought of her husband, five children (the youngest of whom was four) and two grandchildren whom she wouldn't see for six months. She would miss the coming cool months, returning in September when it was beginning to get hot and dust would be thick in the air.

As Huis neared the capital, Windhoek, 300km away, she was already missing her family. But she was excited too: "It was the first time I ever flew," the 49-year-old with a ready smile later recalls. Her trip would take her through another three airports -- Johannesburg, Delhi and Jaipur. She was embarking on an adventure she hadn't been entirely convinced about when the idea had been put to her several months before by a tall, distinguished-looking Indian man who had shown up in Uis Tsaurob one day. He had travelled 8,000km with a proposal for the local people: would they like to send some women from the village to his college in India to study for six months? But why, they had asked, should they travel so far? What would they learn there?

The man replied that he would like to teach them to be engineers. The villagers talked among themselves and eventually decided that they would send three women.

One of them was Huis. The tall Indian man was Sanjit "Bunker" Roy, a social activist, educator and the founder of Barefoot College, an organisation based in Tilonia -- a small village two hours' drive west of Jaipur through the arid farmland of Rajasthan -- that aims to help the estimated 41 per cent of the Indian population who live below the international poverty line. Roy's model -- educating local people through peer-to-peer learning -- is transformational in that it relies on the passing on of traditional skills and knowledge rather than an emphasis on outside educators bringing new ideas and influences. Local people are trained as doctors, teachers, engineers, architects, designers, mechanics, communicators and accountants and they use simple technology in innovative and disruptive ways: mobile phones are set to work monitoring water quality through an online dataset, solar-powered cookers are constructed to break dependence on wood or costly kerosene. Some lessons at the college are recorded and uploaded to the internet. There is no hierarchy: everyone eats sitting on the floor and no one receives a salary of more than $150 per month. Importantly, there is financial transparency. Staff bank accounts are published, as are company finances.

"The model has taken into account the pace at which people think, the culture, which is respected, and the capacity -- the infinite capacity -- of the community to adjust to, apply and to disseminate ideas," says Roy, 65, in a calm baritone as he sits cross-legged on a rug beneath a rotating fan in his simple office on the Barefoot campus. He wears a loose red shirt, or kurta, with white pyjama bottoms. His glasses hang from a chain around his neck. "That's what scalability is all about. It's a model that people understand, it's not complicated. It respects the skills that people have rather than discarding them or replacing them."

Roy has disrupted the model that many NGOs and well-endowed foundations promote in the developing world, namely a top-down approach led by outside, often governmental, institutions. Critics argue that this methodology doesn't offer long-term sustainable growth and isn't scalable. Roy is among them.

"You have a graveyard of successful failures everywhere in the world with this top-down solution that has not worked. With foreign expertise... they don't know the culture and they don't know what's happening in the countries." His voice intensifies. "There is a growing anger We have to look for alternatives. It has to be bottom-up, it has to be indigenous, it has to develop solutions from the ground up, and it has to be both community based and community managed."

There are now 24 colleges inspired by the Barefoot model in India. Since 2004, Roy has brought women from 15 African nations as well as Bhutan, Afghanistan and Bolivia to train at the camp as solar engineers. He hopes soon to bring women from Palestine. The college says it has trained 15,000 women in skills including solar engineering, healthcare, water testing and social activism, and that as a result, around 500,000 people have been provided with basic services such as healthcare, drinking water and education. On the Barefoot campus you can meet women who, only six months earlier, were day labourers and are now practising dentistry, women who formed a collective to manufacture solar ovens, illiterate farmers now overseeing engineering projects, and girls who attend Barefoot night school because they work in the fields during the day when state schools are open. Roy estimates that, in India, the Barefoot solar-electrification programme saves two million litres of kerosene every year.

contSanjit "Bunker" Roy has found a better way to solve poverty: train women as... more